[MediaMole]

If she'd spent her time studying real science instead of "social science," she could have had a good job.

Putting social in front of any word negates its meaning -- Social Science, Social Work...

[tfecw]

Thanks for that :)

i went to an engineering school. We didn't even have a social worker degree. I did meet an ancient languages major once at another school. I was sort of like you pay 30 grand a year to learn a hobby. Yes i'd like fries with that.

[yellowdoghunter]

I agree.

[hunter112]

If she'd spent her time studying real science instead of "social science," she could have had a good job.

Not necessarily. I spent two years from 2001 to 2003 in a community college getting a network administration degree, and can't find work in that field. I'm looking into going back to work in the field that dropped me on the street back in '01, since I at least have "experience". In the computer field, they want you to have five years of experience in a technology that's only been out for four years, so you pretty much have to have been a beta tester way back when in order to meet the requirements.

College seems to be a big waste of people's time, and taxpayer money, anymore. Degrees only impress other academics, and government agencies that hire only relatives of people already working there.

[Law is not justice but process]

"If she'd spent her time studying real science instead of "social science," she could have had a good job. "

Is biology a real science? I have a PhD in biology and I had to go to law school to get a decent-paying job! (depends, of course, on your definition of decent).

Recent events, though, have shown vividly the problems with academia and the general university system. It is a system built and supported by capitalism, but that despises capitalism. Marketability and supply and demand is not understood by most in academia (including, sadly, many economists). Look at Ward Churchill and the president of Harvard. Churchill says things that academia likes (i.e. capitalism=Nazism) in a way that is absolutely offensive to 90% or 95% of Americans. His right to say such offensive things is defended and he is made the poster boy for academic freedom (and could those who favor limiting academic freedom have asked for a better poster boy? this is the biggest self-inflicted wound for academia since . . . well, ever!). The president of Harvard says something that is contrary to the views of many leftist professors in the most polite way possible. Instead of standing up for his freedom of academic thought, the academic leftists want him fired first, then shot. The president of Harvard has a lot of test results to support what he said (whether you agree with his conclusion or not). Churchill cannot prove anyone in the World Trade Center had malice toward arabs or anyone else. Thank God academia is so stupid as to embrace Churchill and spurn the president of Harvard.

This is nothing new. This same sort of ideological double-standard drove me out of academia in the mid 1990s and was there from the time I entered college in the mid 1980s. Conservatives need not apply. I could no more have gotten a job at a large university than Chris Rock could get a gig as emcee at a Ku Klux Klan convention. The small schools left to me paid peanuts and were, though effective teaching institutions, backwaters from the standpoint of doing and supporting research.

So, back to the point. Academics do not take marketability into account in education. The world is full of university graduates with unmarketable degrees (I remember buying a pair of shoes at a mall in Durham and I mentioned I was in grad school at Duke - the girl selling the shoes told me "I am a Duke graduate, I majored in sociology . . . that's why I am selling shoes"). As long as they have a choice, professors will indoctrinate students to be anti-capitalist sociologists before they will encourage them to go to business school (at Duke the Fuqua School of Business and the Law School were the only colleges that turned a profit, every other one was subsidized by those two). Students have to realize that all too often, professors advising them do not have their future income in mind so much as their future ideology.

[FoxInSocks]

Putting social in front of any word negates its meaning -- Social Science, Social Work...

. . . social security . . .

[JGT]

I agree that most of the social sciences are extremely too soft and tend to attract students who simply want to get a degree with minimal effort; not to mention the extremely limited employment opportunities and salaries. But I must add that some of the most significant breakthroughs in conservative studies over the last 75 years have come from individuals with degrees in the social sciences: Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Richard Weaver, Samuel P. Huntington, Dinesh D'Souza, and even Ronald Reagan (degress in economics and sociology).
The social sciences can be useful if the student is not in a program that intentionally sets out to brainwash him/her into the Marxist perspective (very rare to find such a program), and the student has the diligence to pursue the degree all the way to the Ph.D. It is difficult and rare, but it can be done.

[hispanichoosier]

"If she'd spent her time studying real science instead of 'social science,' she could have had a good job."

Oh, I don't know. Economics is a "social science," yet one can get a decent enough job in the financial sector with an econ degree.

[FierceDraka]

Putting social in front of any word negates its meaning -- Social Science, Social Work...

LOL How true, how true. Don't forget about "Social Security", "Social Justice", and "Social Engineering".